230146 SE Circulating Lives: Politics, Economies and Justice in Global Biomedicine (2015S)

The ways we understand life, disease and health have changed significantly in recent decades due to the changing technical and social configurations of the biomedical sciences. The development of new ways of analyzing biological materials and the legal and institutional frameworks that allow new forms of investment in and revenue from the study of life have thereby created new political, economic and moral concerns around biomedicine. Increasingly, these concerns are thought to play out in trans- and supranational contexts. Thus, the global circulation of lives and life sciences is a theme of increasing interest to STS, expressed through the emergence of new actors and geographies in biomedicine, as well as (re-) production of particular forms of exploitation and inequality.

In this course, we explore the (new) sociotechnical formations in the politics, economies and ethics of life in a global, ‘postgenomic’ age. We will explicitly address cases of biomedical circulation and its consequences from around the globe, across three sets of themes. First, we will explore biomedicine in relations to categories of political order including politics itself, citizenship and the idea of nationhood. Second we encounter the (new) economies of life, around questions of how life can be sold, owned, and produced. Third, we engage with implications of the biomedical sciences for justice, seeing both how ideas of justice emerge and how they may be threatened.

The course introduces students to core concepts in contemporary STS scholarship on global biomedicine, introduce students to domains of both transformation and stability regarding the sociotechnical configurations of life, and provide an array of perspectives on these domains from various geographical and cultural viewpoints.